 Search engine marketing is constantly changing. Like social media and other aspects of online marketing, search engines are working to deliver better results for their users. To do this, they are focusing on new areas like localization and social search. As a marketer, it is important to keep up with all of this news, so here is our reading list of search engine optimization (SEO) blogs that will help make you a better marketer.
1. SEOmoz Blog – SEOmoz has become the gold standard for SEO information and how-to articles. Its team of contributors offers an article per day to help expand your SEO knowledge.
2. Marketing Pilgrim – Andy Beal and his team of talented writers break search engine and internet marketing news and discuss major industry trends impacting marketers. Read the rest of this entry »
In the world of advertising and outbound marketing, TV has been the undisputed king in large part because of an ever-growing audience. For the first time in the history of cable television, the industry is seeing a decline in paid subscribers. This chart from Business Insider illustrates the decline as reported by the firm SNL Kagan.
According to Kagan, the firm believes the decline in subscribers is due to poor economic conditions and not the rising online video market. This is despite the rise in the amount of video consumed on YouTube and Hulu and an economic downturn that began long before this reported decline. Apple is rumored to be on the verge of releasing a new product that will bring video streaming and web applications to television sets. Should cable TV companies be worried about the future of their industry?
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“What is the ROI?” is the question that usually follows announcements of new marketing activities. No matter how creative your marketing initiative might be, if it does not result in benefits larger than the initial investment, it is worth a revision.
 The ROI question has now long been part of the conversation about inbound marketing, email and social media. Yet, it remains less visible in the realm of another marketing channel—customer evangelism.
Customer evangelism is a type of word-of-mouth marketing in which a company develops a loyal base of customers who voluntarily spread positive messages about it. As “evangelists,” happy customers engage others in positive communication around a specific service or a product in order to “convert” them. Though word-of-mouth promotion existed before the emergence of digital media, its power has now been reinforced by this new platform.
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 We’re in the midst of a revolution: the revolution of the B2B sales process through social selling. For sales professionals, this revolution means a modernized, improved and more efficient selling process.
This week’s top inbound marketing article discusses the valuable ways social technologies, tools and practices are revolutionizing the science of selling.
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Surprised to see that mystery meat navigation is still alive and kicking (on an otherwise very nicely designed site):
Hull Digital Live website navigation menu
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Posted by willcritchlow
I’d like to invite you to the London Pro SEO seminar we are running on the 25th and 26th October.
With a 98% satisfaction rating and 95% of attendees recommending it to others, we were blown away by the positive feedback we received last year. Seasoned pros like Rob from Easynet Connect called it the "highlight of the year" and we have plenty more where that came from (see for example: "a must attend event for any SEO professional" –PricewaterhouseCoopers). This year we are aiming to put together something even better.
Just like last year, we expect it to sell out, so if you are already sold on coming, I would recommend booking now.
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 Our blog along with many others are full of advice and instructions of things to add to your website. These often include: start a blog, monitor social media, or optimize your site for search engines. While all of these things are important, today I would like you to do something completely different: think about things you should stop doing.
When we add ideas and actions, websites become more complicated. Complication creates confusion and often translates to lower effectiveness. So today instead of telling you to add new things, we offer a few suggestions on things to remove from your business website.
1. Complicated Animations – Flash-based animations can be bad for search engine optimization, but they can also complicate the website experience for visitors. Remember that when users visit your website they looking for something specific. Animations can often be slow to load, which slows down the user and can make them abandon your website. Perform a test. Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site.
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Movie review aggregator website Metacritic underwent a complete redesign last week, much to the dismay of its regular users.
Although the new site sports a more modern design (though it is arguable how attractive it is), the feedback overwhelmingly reports that the site is now harder to use.
Here’s how the new site looks:
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Posted by Danny Dover
In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover tries to answer some of the hard questions in SEO. These include; "If you are such a good SEO, why don’t you rank number one for the keyword, SEO?" and "How can you provide advice on SEO if you don’t work for a search engine?". The answers to these and some other doozies are below.
 Facebook has delivered a major blow to not only to Foursquare and other location-based social networks, but also to Google and Yelp. The social network has announced the launch of a major new feature: Facebook Places. We have talked many times about the adoption and marketing implications of location-based social networks on this blog in the past. However, this trend just got a lot more interesting for marketers.
Facebook Places allows users to check in to offline locations similar to other location-bastion social networks. The Places feature is available in Facebook’s iPhone application as well as their HTML5 mobile site. One change in Facebook Places is that instead of showing people who have checked in nearby, the application will display people near you that Facebook has determined to have relevancy to you.
Although the feature is now available in the newest version of the Facebook iPhone app, the company says it is still rolling out the feature and is not yet available to all users. Another interesting note is that Facebook, via an API, is going to provide developers access to some of the data from Facebook Places to integrate this new feature with outside applications. Additionally, it doesn’t seem like Facebook is out to “kill” other location-based networks. It will allow Foursquare and other major location-based social networks to push location information into Places so that a user can use Foursquare to check in on both Foursquare and Facebook Places.
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